The focus of this proposal is to address the need for more comprehensive suspended sediment monitoring by exploring the capabilities and limitations of emerging techniques for suspended-sediment surrogate monitoring using acoustic technology. The use of suspended-sediment surrogate methods, such as turbidity, laser-diffraction, and acoustic methods, offer the benefits of continuous temporal monitoring, lower cost, and safer implementation than conventional hand-held methods. The benefit of developing the capability may be widespread within Reclamation; the acquired data could be used to refine computational and theoretical tools, as well as gauge the sediment-related effects of reservoir operations including sedimentation rates and downstream water quality.
